In this lesson we will touch on the topic of split toning in Lightroom, or otherwise separate toning. Have you ever had a situation where you take a photo and then feel frustrated that you missed the moment? Perhaps it looks exactly like what you saw, but looking at the image, you realize that something is missing.
This is one of the most difficult challenges photographers face is expressing a feeling or vision in a two-dimensional environment. One of the most important tools in a photographer's kit is color.
An example of warm split toning in lightrum.
I'm not talking about the color of the items in your photo, like a red car or a yellow dress. I mean the overall hue, the tone of your image, that's also important.
Color affects human perception so much that there is a whole science about it. Even some basic knowledge of color theory can improve your photography.
Beyond White Balance
The first place to go to change the hue is white balance. For example, if it's a gray, cloudy day, you can move the temperature slider to a warmer side, making the image yellow-orange or sunny. Move it in the opposite direction and your image will become colder and bluer.
Example cold split toning.
While changing the white balance is useful, it is still a global correction and affects the entire image. In other words, editing the hue of a photo with just white balance is like trying to fix an engine with a sledgehammer. This is not the right tool for the job.
To do finer processing and thus have more control over the overall mood of an image, you should look at split toning.
Purple and warm colors.
A bit of history of toning
Toning was originally a way to change the color of black and white photographs. For example, in the past, chemicals were added during the development process to give images a sepia tone. Over time, other shades of tinting chemicals such as red and blue were used.
It might sound daunting, but in today's digital darkroom, all split toning really means adding color to shadows, highlights, or both. There are several ways to split toning an image. One of the most common is to add yellow to highlights and blue to shadows, or vice versa. However, let's see how you can tweak one color to create a specific mood using Adobe Lightroom (Photoshop and Bridge are also possible).
This is how the split toning sliders look in Adobe Lightroom.
Purple zen
Magenta is my favorite shade that I add to my images. Like yin and yang, this color (purplish red) represents harmony, balance, love and personal growth. It has a calming effect that stimulates creativity and happiness.
When using magenta for split toning, I usually use it in either the shadows or highlights. I rarely make changes in both, as it is often too much. I mainly adjust the shadows, as these are usually the underexposed dark parts of the image, and I try to lighten them. If the image is very bright, then I edit the highlights.
There are no definite rules for how far the sliders can be moved. However, I prefer to move the Hue slider somewhere between 230-250 and Saturation between 10-20. It all depends on the image and the intensity of colors, shadows and highlights. You can also use the eyedropper to pick a color.
Another added bonus of adding a little magenta is that it tends to smooth out the rough edges of colors. Browns, greens, and yellows are smoother, giving the image a softer tint.
Keyboard shortcuts for split toning inLightroom
There are several keyboard shortcuts in the Split Rendering panel in Lightroom that you should be aware of.
First, it can be difficult for you to choose the right color at low saturation. To increase the hue to 100% saturation, simply hold down Option for Mac (or Alt for Windows), then move the hue slider to one side. This will show the color in full force, so it will be easier for you to select it.
Second, to make it easier to see the colors in the image, hold Option / Alt and then move the Balance slider in the Split Toning panel.
Experiment
Split toning is much more than just magenta. Try adjusting the warm and cool tones in your photos using the split toning panel, and use the white balance for something else. With this tool, you can also give your photos a cinematic look, old film, and more. Have fun, get creative and look for what suits you.
Often, when processing photos, you have to think about what color to use for toning, use warm or cold colors, high or low contrast. It is not easy to present an image in advance, so you have to experiment and select a more attractive processing option for a long time.
Each photographer has his own train of thought during processing and individual preferences, so you can only rely on this material to understand the concept. Each will have their own original results. Moreover, if you process the image now and process it again after a few days, the results will be different.
It's important to constantly try new things or apply familiar processing techniques and effects to new pictures. Constant search will teach you to anticipate the result in advance and achieve your goal faster.
Creating several processing options for the same image will allow you to understand in which direction you need to move. You can get variability in Lightroom using virtual copies of images or in Photoshop using layers.
We choose the one we like most from several options.
If you are processing a series of shots, they are usually all taken in the same style. As mentioned above, the processing style depends a lot on mood, time of day, and many other aspects. Therefore, it is better to process the entire series at once, while you are on the same wavelength. Tomorrow or in a week the mood may be different and the subsequent processing will differ from the work already done.
Minor correction
Often, you just need to tweak sharpness, contrast, exposure, or some other basic setting.
Sometimes it is even difficult to tell the difference between the edited image and the original.
For loving couples, yellow is very suitable. It makes photos warmer.
More saturation
Often the colors in photographs are not bright and saturated enough. When the contrast is increased, saturation also increases, but it is advisable to work with it separately. Toning in one common color also looks good.
Adding a new color
Sometimes there is not enough color in the picture. Without it, the photo looks blank. Then you have to add this color.
The new color must be complementary to the existing ones.
Due to the large difference in exposure, the color of the sky or water may be lost. In such cases, you have to return it manually.
B / W
With black and white photography, everything is relatively simple. Often the color is not the main thing in photography and we need to emphasize the shape.
Fabulous effect
Creativity can often make a very good artistic work out of ordinary photography. The most important thing is not to get carried away too much, so that the photo remains itself,
Based on materials from the site:
This article from the series on converting color images to black and white is devoted to toning photos.
Previous articles in this series: Taking black and white photographs with a digital camera: features and difficulties, etc.
There are several ways to get tinted photos using Photoshop. For competent and correct toning, the image must first be converted to its black and white. After all, in essence, any monochrome, monochromatic image is no different from black and white. And if, when converting, the brightness of individual colors are the same, certain details will disappear in monochrome photography.
1. Hue / Saturation
Using a Hue / Saturation adjustment layer or similar command is a fairly simple way to turn a photo into monochrome.
It is necessary to set the Colorize checkbox, use the Hue slider to select the desired color, and use the Saturation slider to set its intensity. Nothing complicated. If the intensity of the color is made low, then the image will appear almost black and white with a slight color tint. This option resembles some types of photographic paper developed in standard mode. Although you can get a stylish photo this way, this method is not very good, as it often leads to a loss of detail in some areas. Any photo can be converted into a combination of color and toned with a certain percentage of color or separate colored areas. This can be achieved by lowering the layer's opacity and / or changing the blending mode. For this shot, the layer's opacity was lowered to 70%, and on the layer mask, the sky area was filled with 20% gray to make it brighter.
2. Gradient map
Gradient maps can be used to get not only black and white, but also toned images. It doesn't matter if it's a command or a Gradient Map adjustment layer. Let's go back to the original photo presented earlier in the article Methods for converting a color image to black and white.
To paint it in one color, blue was added to the black-and-white gradient with the specified transitions.
I only changed the color of one gray stop, although you could change other gradient stops or apply a different gradient.
As you can imagine, in this way the photo can be painted in any imaginable color, as long as the form does not dominate the content.
Please note that with this method of rendering images, the gradients must be performed in the target color space. That is, if the output is in RGB, then the gradients should be created in RGB. And if the output is in CMYK, then the gradients should be created in CMYK.
3. Color Balance - separate toning
If in the first two cases the original was in color, then when applying the Color Balance layer, the original must first be converted to black and white and be in the RGB, CMYK or Lab color space.
Shadows, midtones, and highlights can be tinted in different shades using a Color Balance adjustment layer, just like in the laboratory photographers did a partial superelevation on colored paper from a black and white negative. To obtain a pronounced effect, you should change the highlights and shadows, less often the midtones adjustment. But all the same, it all depends on the nature of the picture. You just need to select Shadows, Midtones or Highlights and add the desired shade.
If necessary, you can change the layer's opacity, blend mode and use a layer mask.
4. Partial bend
To highlight the main part of the image in classical photography, there was a partial superelevation method, when the necessary objects were painted in a certain tone.
The author of this beautiful photograph is Alexey Vasiliev, with the kind permission of whom it is published. In Photoshop, you can implement such a partial superelevation, and according to the same principles as in the traditional method. If earlier you had to whiten a fragment of the image carefully enough for toning, now, before applying the necessary correction layer, you should create an accurate mask. In addition, you can refine it on the adjustment layer. For separate toning, the image was first converted to black and white, then the mill selection was made and saved.
When creating a Hue / Saturation adjustment layer, part of the mask was filled with black in accordance with the selection area. Thus, the selected object was painted in the required color. The rest could be left black and white or painted in a different color. For coloring, load the selection and invert it. Then create another Hue / Saturation adjustment layer and pick the desired color. The sky tone is too light in this image. To enhance the sky, I applied a Curves adjustment layer with a Multiply blending mode. To make it darker, the layer was copied. To avoid amplification of other parts of the image, layer masks were used.
5. Toning by Black & White team
Good toning results can be achieved by the Black & White team.
To add the desired tone to the image in the options of the adjustment layer (command) Black & White, select the Tint checkbox. The default is classic sepia. To select the desired shade, click on the square color swatch to the right of the Tint checkbox,
in the appeared window of the color probe, click on the required tone, and the image will immediately be painted in the selected color.
This will also change the color swatch in the Black & White command window. Note that the Auto button only affects the distribution of tones, not the color of the image.
6. Solid Color and Gradient
Staining with Solid Color and Gradient adjustment layers is done in a similar way. When using a Solid Color layer, shading occurs with one color, and when using a Gradient layer - several. The number of shades depends on the type of gradient and the imagination of the photographer. To control the coloring process in the layer options dialog box, select the Color blend mode. To do this, before selecting an adjustment layer in the layers palette, press and hold the Options (Alt) key. After clicking the OK button, the color probe window will appear. For finer adjustments, you can change the layer's opacity and use a layer mask. Instead of the Color blend mode, you can use the Overlay, Hard Light or Soft Light mode, but then the color shades will be slightly different.
When shading with a Gradient layer, similar to Solid Color, select the Color blending mode in the layer options dialog box. And also before choosing an adjustment layer in the layers palette, press and hold the Options (Alt) key. After clicking on the OK button, the Gradient Fill window will appear. To select the required gradient, click in the Gradient field, after which the gradient editor window will appear. Naturally, you can choose any type of gradient, but for coloring photographs, as a rule, a linear one is used. Such a gradient more or less successfully simulates shooting through color shaded filters. Photos taken through these filters are almost always artificial, since the color transition line is difficult to place in the right place. However, in Photoshop, the process is more manageable. As mentioned earlier, you can use Overlay, Hard Light or Soft Light instead of Color blending mode.
7. Duotone
A grayscale grayscale image has 256 shades of gray. However, if such an image is printed on a household inkjet printer, then, to your great disappointment, you will distinguish no more than fifty shades of gray (this number is even less on laser printers), and various interference and distortions that occur during real printing can further reduce this , already a small number of tones. Duplex images allow you to preserve depth and contrast by printing in two colors, and the number of halftones increases from hundreds to several thousand. In Photoshop, you can also color a photo in three or four colors, producing triplex and quadroplex images.
In Duotone mode, there is no need to convert images from Grayscale mode to RGB, CMYK, or Lab multichannel space for coloring. The Duotone command is available in Grayscale mode. With its help, black-and-white images are prepared for printing in the printing industry. It should be remembered that saving a file in Duotone mode is possible in a limited set of formats: PSD, EPS, PDF.
For printing, images are saved in EPS format using the Print with Preview additional settings. This is necessary in order to avoid moire when printing. When printing on an inkjet printer or on photo paper and subsequent development, these settings are not necessary. And if you print your photos at home or give them away for printing on photo paper, the duplex image (after toning) should be switched to RGB mode. The first time you invoke the Duotone command, the window will display only one color - black. After choosing the Duotone option from the Type list, you need to click on the second square color swatch in the second column. A window will appear in which you can specify the desired color from the color library.
If this option for choosing colors seems difficult to you, click on the Picker button and use the standard color picker. In this case, you must remember that if you are preparing a picture for printing, and it will be printed in Duotone mode, the colors may not be displayed correctly. When you select the Tritone mode, a third color swatch becomes available, which allows you to select another desired color. Often, when choosing the second, and even more so the third and fourth colors, the image can darken greatly. To prevent this from happening, you need to adjust the curves. The corresponding window is opened by clicking on the squares with sample curves on the left.
Raising the right side of the curve will increase the amount of paint in the shadow area for the selected dye, and lowering it will decrease it. The area of highlights and midtones should be treated in the same way.
The Overprint Colors button allows you to define how different colors are superimposed. If you need to edit the image in the future, you need to open the Duotone Options window again (Image-> Mode-> Duotone). The curve thumbnail and the image view will automatically update. Which tones to emphasize - highlights, midtones or shadows - depends on the nature of the photo. What works in one case may not work in another. However, it makes sense to color a series of portraits taken under the same conditions in the same way. The Save and Load buttons allow you to save and load successful settings. If you use sinusoidal curves, you can easily get "psychedelic" images.
It can be considered as a special case of monochrome, that is, black and white image. B / W translation is itself a separate topic of conversation, which is beyond the scope of this article. I will note only two points: firstly, for the best result, you need not just desaturate the image, but adjust the brightness of different colors, for example, using the Black & White tool. And secondly, after transferring the image to b / w, it is often necessary to increase the contrast, as if to compensate for the resulting dullness of the image. These points should not be forgotten when toning photographs.
Thus, for monochrome toning in Photoshop, the tool is best suited. Black & White, in which we first adjust the black and white image. And then, using the setting Tint, paint it in the selected shade.
At the same time, toning can be either complete: with 100% opacity, and partial: when the colors are only slightly given the desired shade.
With one-color toning, everything is simple, but much more interesting is the so-called split toning when a photo is toned in two shades: shadows in one color, light in another. This two-tone toning is conveniently implemented in Lightroom using the tool Split toning... There is no such tool in Photoshop. But there are many other tools that allow you to do two or more color toning. I'll go over the most basic methods of split toning in Photoshop.
Split toning in Photoshop
As an example, I took just such a photo from, which I will tint in different ways.
A very simple way to shift shades of shadows and highlights.
Create a Color Balance adjustment layer and adjust the color shift separately for shadows, midtones, and highlights.
I usually use the mode Preserve Luminosity at which the contrast can increase, if this is not desirable then I simply set the Color blending mode for this layer.
This is the result obtained using the layer settings shown above. Blending mode Color, opacity 61%. Before that, the saturation of the image was lowered with a layer of Black & White - 28% and the contrast was slightly increased.
Here is the layer structure.
If you need full toning, and not just a change in shades, then it is enough to transfer the image to b / w, for example, with a Black & White layer, before Color Balance, and then adjust the color of shadows, light and medium tones.
Thus, not two, but three colors are adjusted here, although there is no way to shift the range of shadows and highlights like in Lightroom.
This tool is very similar to the previous one. Used to fine-tune individual shades, it also allows you to set separate toning, like the Color Balance layer. Only instead of the RGB model, it uses CMYK.
Select Whites, Neutrals, and Blacks from the drop-down list to adjust the light, medium, and dark tones, respectively.
The Relative / Absolute switch is responsible for the impact algorithm. With Relative, the degree of impact depends on the color of the pixel, if this shade was not in the original image (zero), then it will not be added (zero impact). In Absolute mode, the effect is independent of the original colors.
With similar functionality, it is more convenient for me to use the Color Balance tool, the RGB model is more familiar to me. Although Selective Color has the ability to save settings in a file in order to use them later.
Here's a toning done with Selective Color:
3. Blend settings of the Blend If layer
Photoshop has the ability to blend layers based on pixel brightness. To call the blending settings, double-click on the layer where its name is written, but behind it (double-clicking on the name will turn on the renaming mode).
If it didn’t work, then you can call the context menu (with the left mouse button) on the layer and select the item ...
The following settings window will appear:
At the bottom of the window there are two gradient strips that allow you to adjust the transparency of the layer depending on the brightness of the pixels. This is done using black and white triangles. They can be separated by pressing the Alt key to set up a smooth transition. The top gradient sets the transparency setting relative to the pixels of the current layer. The bottom gradient sets transparency based on the brightness of the pixels of the bottom layer.
Thus, you can tint a photo using different layers in different colors and using these settings, one color can be applied to the shadows, and another to the highlights.
I created two Black & White Adjustment Layers:
And then I set up their mixing as follows:
After adjusting the transparency of the layers, I got the following result:
This method of toning a photo allows you to adjust the range of transitions between light and dark tones when toning. Thus, this is the most flexible and at the same time quite convenient way to separate image toning.
4. Layer masks
A similar way, with two layers that separately affect highlights and shadows, can be accomplished with layer masks. It is very easy to create a layer mask based on the brightness of an image. To do this, go to the Channels panel and Ctrl-click on the RGB channel. You will get a selection. Without dropping it, go back to the Layers palette and click the Create Layer Mask button.
In this case, the current selection will turn into a mask. In which: the lightest pixels (opaque) will be white, and the darkest ones will be black, they will be transparent. This trick of creating a selection from the RGB channel simply copies it to the layer mask.
Do the same for the layer that sets the color of the shadows, but at the end press Ctrl + I - this will invert (flip) the mask so that the highlights become opaque.
To adjust the shading ranges, you can apply curves, levels, or luminance commands to the shade layer masks, decreasing or increasing the range of influence of one layer or the other.
Basically, this method is identical to the previous one, using the Blend If blending settings. Use whichever method suits you best.
5. Gradient
Another method for multi-color toning is Gradient. Create an adjustment layer Gradient Map, select the desired colors, set the blending mode (as in other methods, sometimes it is convenient to set the Color mode) and the degree of transparency.
The method is quite elegant - just one layer. But it gives ample opportunities: you can set as many colors as you like, customize transition areas, save settings. But not too interactive. In practice, setting up such toning is not very convenient.
But it's quite an option:
6. Curves.
Another great toning technique widely used by professionals is Curves.
Create a Curves adjustment layer, select the blue channel and set the following curve:
We get this color shift.
Separate control of curves in RGB channels is not the easiest tool in Photoshop. But with proper practice and diligence in mastering it, it works wonders. It is also sometimes useful here to use the Color blend mode to avoid changing the contrast.
Usually not such extreme curves are used, but more subtle shifts. These are the curves I used during processing.
For me, adjusting Curves in separate RGB channels is my favorite way of mocking colors. Along with the Color Balance tool. Less often I use two adjustment layers with the Blend If setting. And I never use Gradient - very inconvenient. Here I talked about it, rather, for completeness of the material. Although Photoshop connoisseurs can easily name five more ways separate toning of the image, it was important for me to tell not about all possible methods, but about the simplest, most convenient and effective ones.
That's all for today. Have a good mood and beautiful flowers in your photos!
In this Photoshop tutorial, we'll show you how you can tint a photo using a gradient map. You will learn how to create your own gradients and tint the image any color you like. We will be working with layers. This way we will not make any changes to the original photo and can easily adjust the intensity of the effect.Here's the image we'll be working with:
This is how it will look after shading with a gradient. Gradient - one of the endless possibilities toning:
Step 1: Create a black and white version of the image.
Before we start toning the image, let's first remove the existing colors and create a black and white version of the image. How you convert the image to black and white is up to you. If you are using Photoshop CS3 or higher (this tutorial uses CS4), the easiest way to create a black and white version is to use the Black & White Adjustment Tool.
If we look at the Layers palette, we can see that there is currently only one layer that contains our image. To add a black and white adjustment layer, click on the “create adjustment layer” icon at the bottom of the layers palette and select Black & White from the adjustment layers list:
The Black & White Adjustment Layer will open in a new window. Move the color (red, yellow, green, cyan, blue, magenta) sliders left or right to lighten or darken areas of the image that originally contained the given color. Moving the slider to the left will make these areas darker, to the right - brighten them.
For example, skin tones always contain many red tones, so to lighten human skin in a black and white version of an image, just drag the red slider to the right. Trees and other plants, as a rule, contain a lot of yellow shades (even if they seem green to us), to darken or lighten them, you need to move the yellow slider to the right or left. Always keep an eye on your image in the document window so you can judge the results:
If you are using Photoshop CS3 and are happy with the result, click the OK button to apply the result. In CS4, the window can remain open. Here is the image after converting it to black and white:
If you look at the layers palette, you will see that you now have two layers. The original image remains intact and there is an adjustment layer just above it. In an adjustment layer, you can make any changes at any time.
Step 2: add the gradient layer settings
Now that we have a black and white version, we can tint the image using a gradient. For this we will use another adjustment layer, this time the Gradient Map. Click again on the "create adjustment layer" icon at the bottom of the layers palette and select from the list Gradient Map / Gradient Map:
Step 3: creating the gradient
By default, Photoshop uses a gradient based on the currently set foreground and background colors (if they are black and white by default, then the gradient will be from black to white). Here's what we see:
We will be toning our image, so a black and white gradient will not work for us. Let's create our own gradient. Click directly on the gradient preview area and you will be taken to the dialog box for creating gradients. At the top of the Gradient Editor, you see thumbnails, each of which is a different predefined gradient that you can select by simply clicking on its thumbnail. We are not going to do this because we are going to create our own gradient.
We didn't choose a pre-made gradient. It is very easy to create your own gradient using whatever colors we would like to see in the final image. To change the color simply click on the bottom left slider and then click on the color swatch to the right of the word color at the bottom of the dialog box.Let's change the black color to something else.
The Photoshop color picker opens. For best results, it is best to create a gradient from darker colors to lighter colors. Here you can choose a color or set its numerical value. Choosing purple color:
Click OK to leave the Color Picker. If you look at the image, you can see that all the dark areas in the photo have turned purple:
Let's now replace the white with some other color. Click on the bottom right slider to change the color:
This time we'll choose a bright yellow color:
Click OK to exit the Color Picker and you will see that areas of the image that were originally white (or had a shade of gray) are now yellow:
